The general welcomed us to his little domicile with as much grace as if he had been ushering us into the throne-room of the Tuileries.  I afterwards understood that he had been governor of the “Invalides;” and the change from the stately halls of that military palace must have severely taxed the philosophy of any man; yet it had no appearance of having even ruffled the temperament of the gallant veteran.  He smiled, talked, and did the honours of his apartment with as much urbanity as if he had been surrounded by all the glittering furniture, and all the liveried attendance, of his governorship.  I have always delighted in an old Frenchman, especially if he has served.  Experience has made me a cosmopolite, and yet to this hour a young Frenchman is my instinctive aversion.  He is born in coxcombry, cradled in coxcombry, and educated in coxcombry.  It is only after his coxcombry is rubbed off by the changes and chances of the world, that the really valuable material of the national character is to be seen.  He always reminds me of the mother-of-pearl shell, rude and unpromising on the outside, but by friction exhibiting a fine interior.  However it may be thought a paradox to pronounce the Frenchman unpolished, I hold to my assertion.  If the whole of “jeune France” sprang on their feet and clapped their hands to the hilts of their swords, or more probably to their daggers, to avenge the desecration of the only shrine at which nine-tenths of them worship, I should still pronounce the Frenchman the most unpolished of Europeans.  What is his look of conscious superiority to all that exist besides in this round world?  The toss of his nostril, the glare of his eye, the contempt of his gathered lip?  Give me the homeliest manners of the homeliest corner of Europe—­nay, give me the honest rudeness of the American savage, in preference to this arrogant assumption of an empty superiority.  Why, the very tone in which every Frenchman, from fifteen to five-and-forty, utters the words “la France,” is enough to raise the laugh, or make the blood boil, of all mankind.

Nearly twenty years after this, I happened to be sitting one day with Gentz, the most memorable practical philosopher of his age and country.  Germany was then in the most deplorable depression, overrun with French armies; and with Napoleon at Erfurth, in the pride of that “bad eminence” on which he stood in such Titanic grandeur, and from which he was so soon to be flung with such Titanic ruin.  Our conversation naturally turned on the melancholy state of things.

“I think,” said the great politician, “that this supremacy must fall.  I might not think so if any other nation were the masters of Europe; but France, though often a conqueror, has never been a possessor.  The insolence of the individual Frenchman has been the grand obstacle to the solidity of her empire.”

To my remark, that her central position, her vast population, the undaunted bravery of her troops, and the military propensities of her people, fitted her to be the disturber of Europe.